The Gift, Part II: A Wagon Train Christmas Story
by Sevenstars
Summary: Bill Hawks receives the one Christmas present he never expected.


**The Gift, Part II**

**A Wagon Train Christmas Story**

_by Sevenstars_

SUMMARY: Chris has retired, Coop is married, Bill and Charlie have started up a small freighting business in California, and Barney's 21 and scouting for another wagon train. When he comes "home" for Christmas, it's with a very special gift for Bill.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

**Sonora, California, December, 1882**

"You'd think we'd have heard somethin' by now," Bill Hawks grumbled.

"If there was anything to hear," Charlie Wooster amended. "Hawks, you're gettin' as bad as an old mama hen. You know that if any of the passes had blocked up early we'd have heard of it by now. And if there'd been any other kind of trouble, Coop would'a' heard of _that,_ and let us know."

"He wasn't this late last year," Bill insisted.

"So? Every year's a little different, that's what keeps the job from gettin' monotonous," said Charlie. "Or—well, maybe he met somebody. Maybe he's up in Sacramento or down in San Francisco courtin'. He's gonna be twenty-two in January, you know. He always was easier with girls than any of us."

Diverted for a moment, Bill snorted. "He's too young to be thinkin' about settling down."

"Don't tell me, tell _him,"_ said Charlie. "And what I came out to tell you, supper'll be on the table in five minutes."

"I'd rather stay here..." Bill began.

"Be sensible," Wooster urged. "In another fifteen minutes you won't be able to see as far as the end of the block. What good is it gonna do you to sit here and maybe get a chill? Remember we've got a run tomorrow before we head down to Coop's place for Christmas Eve."

Bill took a breath, paused, and gave in. Unlike some of the old Mother Lode towns, Sonora wasn't crammed into a little valley or strung out along a gulch—it stood at just about the 1825-foot mark—and night didn't come down like a theater curtain falling or linger till midmorning. But the residential streets were poorly lit, and Charlie's point about visibility was well taken. "Okay. I guess Tai'll be after me with his cleaver if I let the food get cold." Tai Wo-She was the Chinese houseman they paid forty dollars a month to cook, clean house, and take care of the chickens and their two personal horses. "He may be a better hand with a skillet than you were, Charles, but he's also got a lot shorter temper when it comes to bein' on time for meals."

"I reckon that's what they mean when they say you have to take the bad with the good," Charlie retorted.

It had been thirty-four years since James Marshall first spotted the gleam of a gold nugget in the bottom of the tail-race at Sutter's Mill, setting off the greatest swarm of human migration since the Huns moved west. Gus Morgan's Kansas Pacific, after stalling at Denver for half a dozen years, had finally made it over the Sierra Nevada and down to San Francisco in '78, completing the first transcontinental rail route, but wagons remained a popular means of going west, especially for families. Trains were fast, but they had some serious drawbacks, especially for long-distance travel. You could go by emigrant car from Omaha to California for $60 per person, which included space allotted for furniture, implements, and livestock, but these cars were always the first to be delayed—often they were shunted onto sidings to let the Fast Mail and even the first-class freight runs get by—which made it impossible to predict when they would stop, so there could be very long intervals between meals. There was no privacy, no segregation of the sexes, and sleeping accomodations consisted of a board cut out to fit the space between the facing benches and more or less softened by cotton bags leanly stuffed with straw, which could be rented or bought for $2.50; passengers furnished their own blankets or did without. The news butchers worked the cars perpetually, but hot meals were available only at the station eating houses, where the stops were sometimes only ten minutes long, so that food (which cost fifty cents to a dollar per person) often had to be abandoned when the train capriciously began to move again; box lunches circumvented this, but of course they were cold, just like the butcher's offerings. Second class cost $80, and you could take with you only what would fit on the baggage car, unless several families went in together to rent a freight box; these cars could be extremely cold, food was often unavailable for long stretches of time, and at times passengers suffered from incredible thirst, and as there was no sleeping car you had to doze sitting up. First class cost $100 and was much more comfortable, but again there was a limitation on baggage, and the sleeper cost another two dollars per night and two per day, plus a dollar for every meal (though they were both leisurely and good) in the dining car and at least a quarter a day to tip the porter. A farm family of five, going from Omaha to San Francisco, would pay anywhere from $660 for a four-and-a-half-day first-class journey to over $450 for a ten-day ordeal on the emigrant cars—and that didn't include what the former would have to pay at journey's end to replace all the truck it had left behind. And while the automatic lubricator had come into use more than a decade ago, delivering a steady flow of oil to all the friction points on an engine and preventing overheating of the steam engine itself, hotboxes still necessitated half-hour stops. Then there were accidents, most particularly rear-end collisions caused by breakdowns in equipment or inability to stay on schedule, along with the ever-increasing speed of trains. They collided with such force that the flimsy passenger cars "telescoped" through each other, causing horrific casualties, and even the effective trussed platform and compression buffer system, patented as early as '69, couldn't fully alleviate the problem. Vibration loosened rails and trestle bolts, causing derailments and bridge collapses, and although all-iron T-rails, not prone to warping and breaking apart like the old strap kind, had come into fairly universal use, there was still the matter of "snake's-heads"—rails that came loose from the fish-plate at one end and went up over the wheel instead of lying down under it, sometimes smashing right through the floor of a car. Apart from all this, railroads' attempts (however elementary) to keep to schedule and their inflexibility of route meant that a family looking for a place to settle had to either send a scout ahead or take its chances on an area based on what it could see from the windows. A wagon train could take six months to make the trip, but that very leisureliness allowed a certain comfort, besides an opportunity to really see the country and make an informed decision about where to stop, and a whole family could do the journey for only about $100, apart from supplies and a wagon and team, though if they were farmers they probably had the latter already. They could also carry with them all the things they valued, and all the stock and implements they would need to make their new home viable. Chris Hale often said it wouldn't surprise him to hear of wagons crossing the South Pass a dozen years from now.

After eighteen years as a surveyor, sixteen leading wagon trains, and three in between serving the Union in the war, Chris had finally made up his mind to retire after the 1880 outfit, not because of his age so much—he wasn't yet sixty—but because his lumbago was getting worse every year. Coop, creeping up on forty and more and more aware with each passing season of his "burning desire to see things grow under my direction," as he'd once put it, had decided to settle down too. The two of them had gone in together to buy eight sections of land near Coulterville, where Chris was working on his memoirs and keeping the ranch books and Coop and a crew of _Californios_ doing the day-to-day work of raising about 230 weanling calves a year to be sold for stockers and keeping four stallions—two for hired stud and for the thirty-odd home mares, two others to cover other folks' mares only. It had taken Coop only about eight months to find a woman who suited him, a neighboring rancher's daughter, and last year they'd welcomed a son, named Cooper Jr. according to the Smith family tradition. Duke Shannon and his wife Margaret weren't far off, up in Modoc country in Calaveras County; he was thirty-four now and they had two children, a girl named Christine in Chris's honor ("Christy" for convenience and to save confusion) and a boy named William Cooper after Bill and Coop ("Billy" for short). The Shannon youngsters had learned to speak of "Uncle Chris," "Uncle Bill," "Uncle Charlie," and "Uncle Coop," though Coop's son wasn't yet to the point of more than wordless shouts.

With their old trailmates out of the business, Bill past his fiftieth birthday and Charlie in his sixties and more bothered by his rheumatism than ever, the two old comrades had agreed that it was about time they quit playing rolling stone too. But after more than fifteen years together, sparring and teasing and occasionally saving each other's lives, neither could envision life totally apart, so they had made up their minds to go into business as partners. Although the original placers were effectively exhausted, many former miners had fallen in love with the beautiful foothill country, and at least forty one-time mining camps, from Sierra City south to Mariposa, had found new leases on life as supply centers for farms, small ranches, lumbering operations, quarries, and even still gold, though mostly hard-rock quartz lodes now. True, they had diminished considerably in size—Sonora, the seat of Tuolumne County, commercial center of a wide area, and a bustling, energetic place, had at its height counted between fifteen and twenty thousand people, a figure now barely matched by San Francisco—but towns they were, with churches and schools, marshals' offices and fire departments, gardens and orchards and vineyards, dramatic and philharmonic societies, lyceums, lending libraries, community brass bands, and buildings made of native stone, in shades of brown, beige, reddish brown, and cream. Unlike the situation in the Colorado mountains, there wasn't enough demand to foster a network of narrow-gauge railroads, but the towns, some with very respectable populations, needed all sorts of goods, so freighting prospered throughout the region. The old mule-trails that had once been the only routes in and out of some of them had been widened and smoothed into good toll-roads, and instead of roistering miners and a population leaning heavily to the male, most were now the abode of families, married men with children; there were still bachelors and saloons and ladies of easy virtue, as there must be wherever mines are found, but the roaring Days of '49 were almost a legend: there were few men still around who had taken part in them, and those in their fifties and sixties.

So Hawks and Wooster had established a little freighting business out of Sonora, with a snug four-room house on the edge of the town to live in between runs, and even in only two seasons they had built up a name for reliability and good service. The only one of the old crew still riding the trails was Bill's unofficial foster son, Barney West. Coming up on twenty when the others decided to quit, he felt he was too young to settle down yet, but with recommendations from a respected wagonmaster (Chris) and an experienced scout (Coop) he had found it easy enough to get work on the wagon trains that still plied the overland trails. It wasn't quite as perilous a line now as it had been even five years ago, since most organized Indian resistance had finally been suppressed, but there were still renegades, not to mention river crossings and mountain passes that needed advance examination, and sometimes ranchers who had to be negotiated with before they'd let an outfit cross their land, or a need to ride ahead and buy stock. So Barney kept busy scouting, and in the winter he'd come back to Sonora and help Bill and Charlie, or maybe do some stand-in deputying for Coop, who'd been elected sheriff of Mariposa County last year.

But this year he was late, and Bill was worried. He knew Charlie was right: the major passes had stayed clear almost to Thanksgiving, even if Barney's outfit had been planning to come in that way (which, at last word, it hadn't), and if any individual catastrophe had befallen the youngster before his outfit reached the mountain wall, his boss—he was riding for Fletch Maitland again this season—would have come by to tell them so, or at least written. All the same, even if he'd made San Diego, or Sacramento, or San Francisco, without a scratch on his hide, he was still young and sometimes headstrong and quick-tempered, and he'd been taught gun work as much by Coop—who'd once earned a living by hiring his sixgun out—as by Bill; anyone who knew that might just be tempted to try him, even if Barney himself had better sense than to start anything. San Francisco particularly, though it might not be a frontier town, could still be a rough place for a young man without backup.

Tai was just setting out the curried chicken and noodles when Bill and Charlie came in; he looked up with a hint of a frown, then asked quietly, "Mister Barney not coming?"

"No," Bill sighed, "it doesn't look like it, not tonight, anyhow. He knows better than to blow in past seven and expect you to feed him, Tai. Maybe he'll get in tomorrow while we're gone."

"Maybeso," the cook agreed. "I fix gooseberry cobbler in case."

Bill managed a half smile. Barney had his faults, but people took to him, all the same—even cooks. "Thanks, Tai. But put it in a crock so we can take it with us down to Mister Coop's if Barney doesn't show, okay? No point lettin' it go to waste."

"Better not," Tai agreed with a faint grumbly note under his voice; if there was one thing he hated more than people being late for meals, it was people wasting food, especially if he'd cooked it.

The next day's run was a short one, less than fifteen miles up to Angels and as much back; this late in the season most people had already finished their Christmas shopping, and anything coming late was most likely to be shipped by express, which was faster. There was still no sign of Barney when Bill and Charlie got back to Sonora, and the former ramrod resigned himself to the necessity of heading for Coulterville without him. Barney knew they'd be there for Christmas Eve; if he figured he couldn't make Sonora in time to catch them before they left, he'd follow.

They took the buckboard because of the Christmas presents and their share of the feast; it could reel off sixty miles in a day given a good road and reasonable weather, and getting off right after breakfast they made Coop's place a little past noon. The house was built in the classic _Californio_ style, two storeys under a low-pitched hipped roof, half a dozen windows across each, double verandas looking out over the front garden, pecans and Asiatic elms for shade and grapevines clambering up trellises—Coop was looking forward to making his own wine, for home consumption at least. There was a California live-oak, transplanted from the coast, at the back door, fruit trees—apple, cherry, peach, plum—lining the hard-packed garden path and speckling the grounds.

At thirty-nine there was a touch of deep metallic gray beginning to show at Coop's temples, but the lines on his face were still those of weather and laughter, not age, and his deep-chestnut hair was still thick and wavy. His wife Maddie (she'd been baptized "Sistine Madonna," by way of an art-loving father, but nobody ever called her that) was a dozen years younger, with auburn hair and deep blue eyes flecked with pale yellow. Little Coop, who had his mother's hair but his father's midnight eyes and lopsided smile, was walking with surprising speed now, and sometimes breaking into an inexpert gallop that kept his _Californio_ nursemaid scurrying after him. Chris, who had a little outbuilding near the back gate, away from the hustle and bustle of the house, where he could work on the memoir he hoped to get published next year, was there to meet his old friends too. "Where's Barney?" he asked in surprise once all the handshaking and kissing was out of the way.

"Not back yet," said Bill. He looked to the former scout. "You haven't heard anything, have you, Coop?"

"If I had I'd'a' sent you word first thing, Bill, you know that," Smith replied in his warm gravelly East-Texas drawl. "Which way was he comin' this year?"

"Southern route, same as last. Santa Fe, Socorro, Fort Apache, Prescott, Yuma, San Diego. At least that was the last we heard—doesn't seem like Fletch would have changed his mind so late in the game."

Coop frowned. "It's a fair piece of a ride," he noted. "Close to four hundred fifty miles from Diego to here by way of Fresno. Take him a good nine days if he wasn't pushin'."

"Still," Bill insisted, "he should have finished the trip a good month ago. Even if he went up to San Francisco afterward to do some Christmas shopping—and he could get just about anything in Sacramento that he could find there—he still could have made it to Sonora at least a week before we had to leave there. He did last year." Charlie clucked, chicken-fashion, and Bill whirled indignantly. "I am _not _bein' a mother hen!"

"Could'a' fooled me, ha, ha," Wooster retorted.

Coop shot Chris a look. They both had some experience with the southern route; it avoided snow-blocked passes, but the Apaches remained a menace—almost the only tribe that still did. "Might be kinda hard gettin' hold of anybody who'd know anything," the Texan observed. "Too close to Christmas, lots of folks on the road, goin' to friends' and kinfolks' houses, same as you. Could ride into Coulterville and send out some telegrams, but I can't promise."

Hawks took a deep steadying breath. "It's probably nothing," he said, but he still sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. "His horse could have gone lame, he could be layin' over at some ranch till it can travel. But I wish he'd at least have sent a wire—it's not fair to make Maddie and Esperanza—" that was the Smiths' cook— "count on him if he's not gonna make it in time for Christmas."

"It's no trouble, Bill," Maddie assured him. "What's one more portion, or one more chair at the table? Come in, anyway, and have some lemonade or something. Duke and Margaret and the children should be here in another few hours, in time for supper, I'm hoping."

They were, and the annual reunion was marred only by Barney's continued absence from it. Christy and Billy were put to bed in Little Coop's nursery, with Dolores to look after them, and Bill and Charlie were shown to the same room that was always kept for them. Next day was Christmas Eve, and a fir tree from the mountains was brought into the _sala_ and set up for decoration, with another in the big room that was used for staff parties, banked with gifts for all the _Californios_ who worked on the place and their children too. It was also the last night of _Las Posadas_ and the traditional evening for _Los Pastores,_ the rollicking, often hilarious, and sometimes shocking re-enactment of the misadventures of the shepherds on their way to see the baby Jesus. According to Smith ranch tradition, this was given in the "servants' hall" after the _Posadas_ troupe had finished up its quest there, followed by a _pi__ñ__ata_ for the children, presents for everyone, food and drink and dancing.

It was almost eleven when the door suddenly opened, and Bill came to his feet with a shout that was half relief and half rebuke. "Barney!"

In five years' time Barney West had filled out some, broadened a bit in the shoulders and put on two or three inches of height, but he would never match Duke or Bill in size: he was wiry and graceful, but only about five feet eight. He was dusty from the road and still wore his Colt against his left hip. His old trailmates converged on him for handshakes and demands to know what had kept him so long, until Maddie intervened and insisted that he be allowed to wash up and get something to eat and drink before he was expected to explain himself. Coop sent one of his stablemen out to take care of Barney's pinto, Cherokee, who was nine years old but as strong and fast as he'd ever been, and see that the young man's gear was taken up to the main house.

"I'm sorry I took so long," Barney said over coffee and _tamales_ and frosted cakes. "I'd have been here yesterday, or even before, it's just—"

"Just _what?"_ Bill demanded. "You could've sent a telegram if you were held up somehow."

"I thought of that, but I didn't know how long my business was gonna take," Barney said, "so what could I have told you, really? Just my luck to get a judge who had to take his time—"

"A judge?" Chris echoed. "Did you get in some kind of trouble, Barney? In that case you really should have telegraphed—Coop or me, if not Bill; maybe we could have helped."

"Not trouble exactly, Mister Chris." Like Charlie, Barney still called the ex-wagonmaster by his semi-formal title. "It was just... a process, you might say." He reached into his short Mexican-cut jacket and pulled out a rolled sheet of paper. "Here, Bill. Merry Christmas."

Puzzled, Bill smoothed the sheet out against the tabletop, noticing the seals at the bottom. A court document, sure enough. He scanned the signature, then went back up to the top to begin picking his way through the whereases. When he looked up from it, his eyes were suspiciously bright. "Barney—you didn't have to—you shouldn't—"

"Why shouldn't I?" Barney retorted. "You said once that you were as close as I had to a father. I kind of resented it at the time, but I shouldn't have; it was true—you were, and you are, as close as I ever had to one, or ever will. I just thought, now that I'm old enough to petition the courts on my own behalf, it was time I showed just how much I appreciated everything you did for me."

"Hawks?" Charlie put in. "What is it? What's he done?"

"He's changed his name, Chuck," Bill explained in a voice not quite steady. "Look here, it says—Barnaby Russell _Hawks."_

Chris looked as if he wasn't quite sure whether to congratulate his former ramrod or rebuke Barney for casting off his only remaining blood ties. "Barney," he said slowly, "does your—I mean, does Barnaby Senior know about this?"

"That's a good part of what made me so late, Mister Chris," the young man explained. "As soon as the judge found out that my father—my birth father—is still alive, he insisted on findin' out if this was okay with_ him._ I don't know why, bein' that I'm almost twenty-two—I tried to explain about my half-brother, but when a judge says something—" he shrugged— "what are you gonna do? And then, come to find out, he and his family had headed up to Susanville to spend Christmas with his in-laws, and that's a good two hundred thirty-five miles from Sacramento, five days up a-horseback and five days back... just lucky that the clerk he'd left in charge of the store knew where they live." He sighed. "Maybe I should'a' filed the petition in January, as soon as I turned twenty-one, but I'd still have had to go to Sacramento do it, and I couldn't think what kind of excuse to give Bill and Charlie. And then what if they hadn't needed me in court till spring? I had to leave myself time enough to get back to St. Joe and find a train to sign up with, or I'd'a' been out a season's work."

"I'd'a' kept you on as a deputy, if you'd asked, Barney," Coop told him. "It's no easy job, wearin' a rancher's hat and a sheriff's badge both at once, and least of all in spring when my studs are bein' asked to cover four or five mares every week."

"Didn't think of that, I guess," Barney admitted. "Anyway, they finally tracked him down—my father, I mean—and he gave a deposition... said it was fine with him if it was what I wanted, seein' that I'd never really lived in his house. I just got the final decree two and a half days ago. Been ridin' ever since, hopin' I'd make it before you all turned in."

" _'The law is slow,' " _Duke murmured, _" 'but, like a turtle, it gets there.' "_

"That's what it did," Barney agreed. "So it's all legal—though since I've made my reputation as Barney West, I'll keep that name for the scouting. But in California I'm Barney Hawks, and that's the name my kids will have, when I have some."

"Barney," said Bill, "I don't know what to say."

The young man looked up at him and smiled as a church bell down the valley began ringing for midnight Mass. "How about 'Merry Christmas, son'?" he suggested.

Hawks threw his arms around his newly-legalized offspring and held him in a hug that should by all rights have stopped his breath. "Only if you'll make it 'Merry Christmas, Dad,' " he returned.

Coop picked up a cup of punch and raised it in a toast. "Here's to Bill and Barney Hawks!" he proclaimed.

"Merry Christmas, Bill and Barney!" everyone chorused, with a clinking of meeting glass.

-30-


End file.
